Palliative care offers those with serious illness services that optimize quality of life and reduce suffering. Among these services include pain management, nutrition, and counseling.
Palliative care has
specifically been recommended for those patients with advanced cancer by the American Society for Clinical Oncology.
Using data from more than 1,200 hospitals across the US from 2010–19, Han and her coauthors find that "state-level Medicaid expansion under the ACA was associated with greater increases in receipt of guideline-recommended
palliative care among patients undergoing initial treatment for newly diagnosed stage IV cancers than the concurrent increases seen in nonexpansion states."
This association was "particularly strong" for those cancer types with "significant symptom burden" like pancreatic and lung cancer.
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Project HOPE is a global health and humanitarian relief organization that places power in the hands of local health care workers to save lives across the globe. Project HOPE has published Health Affairs since 1981.
